Rawal Darshana Rameshchandra, India
TIF Travel Grant Awardee
ISPRS Technical Commission VI, Wuhan, China
19-21 May, 2014
Dear All,
First of all I would like to Thank you for giving me an
opportunity through Grant to Attend the Mid-Term ISPRS
Commission VI Symposium on “Data, Information, and
Knowledge Sharing for Geo-Education” with this mail I would
like to share my view and experience in the Mid-term
Symposium at Wuhan University.
The initial days of the trip involving the ISPRS Conference
turned out to be fruitful, by meeting people, students, experts
from all over the globe in the field in which we happen to
work. The best session for me was by the White Elephants,
training about confidence building and guiding for levelling up
presentation skills and thesis capabilities. The presentation of
geospatial studies by different professors from Germany,
Australia, Netherlands, and Finland did open my mind to new
areas of work for us. Other sessions were equally interesting.
The experience of hearing oral presentations in an
international conference was one of a kind for me. Listening to
presentations by students was a learning experience too. The
conference did include a one-day trip to the Three Gorges
Dam. This trip was a perfect combination of learning and also
spending quality time with all professors, university students,
other tourists and all people gathered from all across the world
for the conference. It was a time with happiness at its peak and
then a farewell and good bye to the conference and the new
friends we made. Then we jumped with a fresh mind for the
summer school.
I feel I was lucky to be a part of this summer school “Geospatial
Service Platform for Education and Research”. Before joining I
was completely new to this terminology, but the first session
was such that it started introducing the basics and added
applications to it, dividing students in different theme based
teams as per their area of interests and training them with
newly developed softwares. The professor and other guides
were always helpful and full of innovative ideas and thoughts.
The lectures were very interactive and involving. I found an
increase in the level of my interest level in the field of remote
sensing after this session. Working in a team of seven with
people from China, Russia and others proved to be an
interesting learning experience. Learning software designed by
the students of the university encouraged and motivated me to
pull my socks up. I knew that China will always have this
language problem and food issues, but we did manage well and
sort things by either finding helpful Chinese people around
with Basic English knowledge or using Google translator.
The sessions either in the conference or summer school were
managed very well by the students and other department
people of the university. There was a lot to learn from them in a
way of how to manage things at such international scale. I take
full pride in saying that a lot of our ideas and thoughts were
very well attended and appreciated by them.
Evenings were spent to viewing parts of Wuhan City with my
Professor and students. The infrastructure kept my eyes wide
open always. The East Lake on one side of the university, the
yellow crane tower, dinner at five star hotels with Chinese
cuisine (though there was nothing we could eat) all such
attractions in Wuhan made this trip worth while.
I am very happy to meet with Prof. Marguerite and Prof. Tinder
during the symposium. Attachment is a report on Symposium
and summer school which we had submitted to our University
for your reference.
Thanking you for giving me a wonderful opportunity.
With best regards
Darshana Rawal
Research Assistant
CEPT University
Ahmedabad,India